[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome, everyone.
Thank you for joining us today's program
featuring artist, Ann Le, presented
as part of the Wignall Museum's Home Edition.
Home Edition is a series of curated artists talks,
workshops, and discussions featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
And I serve as the Director and Curator of the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall Museum is a teaching museum and interdisciplinary
arts space that introduces Chaffey College students,
faculty, staff, and community members
to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy, the museum seeks to enhance
the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we are situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unsuited lands
of the [INAUDIBLE] people.
We offer our recognition and respect to the elders
both past, present, and future.
And hello.
My name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm Assistant Curator at the Wignall Museum.
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Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the Preparator at the museum.
In a moment, Ann Le will present for about 30 minutes
or so with our remaining time being available for Q&A.
Thanks, Roman.
Thanks, Andy.
So today, I have the pleasure of introducing
our guest artist, Ann Le.
Ann Lee received a BFA from Cal State Fullerton and her MFA
from Cal State Long Beach.
Le's work explores identity, culture, family history,
and the duality of becoming Vietnamese
American in her work.
Inspired by the cultural context in her life,
Le correlates the artificial with remembrances
of generational trauma.
Sentiment is vital in her work as she
questions her personal experiences
to construct imposing art.
She excavates her lineage by revisiting her family's
experiences by using personal and found images
to reconstruct slippages in time and history.
As layers of images are stacked upon one another,
Lee travels through time commenting
on the idea of home displacement separation
and how we embrace and conquer loss.
Tragic and poetic composites are pieced together
to unravel narratives which places
her Vietnamese American perspective
into a contemporary landscape.
Ann Le was born in San Diego, California.
And currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
So please join me in giving Ann a warm virtual welcome.
Thanks, Ann.
Hi.
Thank you for having me today.
I kind of lost my voice Wednesday.
So I'm taking it easy.
Hopefully the sound sounds OK.
But yes, thank you for having me.
I'm going to get right into this.
I'm going into this lecture.
I don't know if it's going to be 30 minutes.
I might go over.
So I'll skip some slides as we go along.
I always over prepare for a lot of things.
So bear with me.
Bear with me, please.
OK.
All right.
Zoom.
You know, I really do love Zoom.
The platform's really cool.
OK.
I created this presentation about a month ago.
And I just added this slide this morning
because today is a very important day
in Vietnamese American history where April 30,
1975 was the fall of Saigon.
And I follow this new wave documentary on social media.
And they just have a lot of pertinent information
about Vietnamese Americans.
Vietnamese that have been dispersed all over the nation.
And I just wanted to share this slide with you.
I'm thinking about how young--
like how young Vietnamese people are in America.
We're about 46 years old in the United States.
All right.
So again, I created this slide, this PowerPoint,
about a month ago.
And I'm going to segue just directly into my most
current works.
And I made a few collages in response
to the happenings or the shootings that happened
in Atlanta with the spa.
And I went on a stop Asian hate rally in West Hollywood.
With the collage that I've created,
which caused [INAUDIBLE] cause which picked up traction
with the LA Times.
So here is an image of myself and the signage
that I've created with this current body of work
entitled, Model Myth.
And I'm not the type of creative to work simultaneously
with the news that's happening in the world.
But I needed to kind of like dump that energy, and that
like sadness, and anger from my process before starting
new work.
So that's the way that I process information and energy.
It was also printed in the LA Times the following morning.
So I'm going to get into, again, my most current works.
And it's 3 collages entitled Model Myth.
2021.
And I'm just going to read you this information.
"A model minority is a minority demographic
whether based on ethnicity, race, or religion, whose
members are perceived to achieve a higher
degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Thus serving as a reference group to outgroups.
This success is typically measured relatively
by educational attainment, representation
in managerial and professional occupations,
and household income, along with other socioeconomic indicators
such as low criminality and high family and marital stability."
This was the first collage that was created.
I make notes to myself this was made on March 17, 2021.
I leave myself so many notes because I
forget so many things.
But this is entitled Vincent Chin.
And this collage is about Vincent Chin,
a Chinese-American man, on June 19, 1982
with beaten to death with a baseball bat in Detroit,
Michigan by two white men frustrated with the US auto
industry's troubles.
The two were sentenced to three years probation,
and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine.
Two civil right trials and a civil suit followed.
But neither spent a day in jail.
The Vincent Chin case serves as a wake up
call to address anti-Asian bias and racial tolerance.
As I was walking through the rally,
there was this older gentleman on the sidewalk.
He yells out, who is Vincent Chin?
Right.
And I think, oh, yes.
Remember those exact words.
And when you get home, Google it because there's a documentary
entitled, Who's Vincent Chin.
Save.
Model myth, this is a socket collage entitled
"Stockton Schoolyard Shooting 2021."
January 1989, among the facilities
were Rathanar Or, age nine, Ram Chun, age eight, Sokhim An,
age six, Oeun Lim, age 8, and Thuy Tran, age six.
They were Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants
who came with their families to the US as refugees.
The gunman, who had an extended criminal history,
shot and killed 5 school children and wounded 32 others.
His victims were predominantly Southeast Asian refugees.
The attack was a US non-college school
shooting with the highest number of fatalities and injuries
until the Columbine High School massacre.
Of all US school shootings in the '80s,
it had the largest number of victims.
So these are all appropriated images from the web
that I've deconstructed and reconstructed.
I'm going to segue.
So I'm just going to show you a few pieces
from my current works.
This is a body of work entitled, Loanwords.
Loanwords.
The adaptation of French loanwords in Vietnamese.
Due to the influence of France while Vietnam
was a French colony, many French words
have been adopted by the Vietnamese.
I realize that I am a research type
of person where when an idea comes, I immediately go
and research that idea before it just like leaves my mind.
And most of my works are like information based,
and then the collage comes.
So this image is entitled Bom, Bombe, Bomb in Vietnamese
French and English.
And this here is note to self tight timeline of colonization
and war, and thinking about my parents.
And I feel like the majority of my work
is made through thinking about my mom,
thinking about my parents, thinking about all
of the Vietnamese refugee families that have been
dispersed all over the nation.
So the French occupied Vietnam from 1887 to 1954.
Vietnam was a part of a French colony called French Indochina.
The Vietnam US War started in '61 and ended in '75.
My parents were born in Can Tho, Vietnam in 1950 where
they spend their first four years of life
under French rule.
From 11 to 25 years old, my parents lived through the war.
And at 29, they fled Vietnam with a three-year-old daughter.
So that's my process on again making the work.
Like envisioning myself through this journey.
So this body of work, Loanwords, was created in 2015.
But visually, then the work didn't make sense to me.
So I went back into my archive to rework this body.
This is entitled "Baton."
So ba-toong, baton, baton.
Again, Vietnamese, French, English.
And when I go into my collages, I
give myself really strict rules of, is it
a two layered collage?
Is it a three layered collage?
Where does the text live?
And I feel like by giving myself those rules I don't trail off
into a segue that wouldn't make sense for me.
Foreground image, tactical squad marching through park blocks
during 1970 students strike.
And this here is just the information on a baton,
also known as a nightstick, and its history.
But I'm going to read you this last paragraph here.
"On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard
fired into a crowd of demonstrators
at Kent State University.
Four people were killed, and another nine were wounded.
The group was mostly students protesting the Vietnam War
and America's intention to expand the conflict by sending
troops into neutral Cambodia."
This image is entitled Et-Xang Essence, Gasoline.
Vietnamese, French, and English for the word gasoline.
Quote, "No news picture in history
has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."
JFK.
So this image here is a very famous image.
This is Thich Quang Duc.
He was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk
who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection
on the 11th of June '63.
He was protesting the persecution of Buddhists
by the South Vietnamese Roman Catholic government.
Duc is doused with gasoline while calmly sitting down
in the traditional Buddhist meditative lotus position.
Photographed by Malcolm Brown.
So I feel like there are about five of these colleges so far.
I needed to take a break from them because it
was just overwhelming research.
So a lot of my works are works in progress.
But the ideas is fully there.
It's fully finished.
Skip that one.
I'm going to segue into this body of work
that I created last summer in June entitled, Tear x
Scape/Terrorscape.
This touches on weapons of warfare used on the landscape
globally.
Tear gas was first used in World War I in chemical warfare.
In 1925, the Geneva Convention categorized
tear gas as a chemical warfare agent,
and banned its use during wartime.
But its use by police in the US is still legal.
And these are just the titles of each piece.
And they're numbered by when they were finished.
So this image on the left was the first
from this body of work entitled, Jungle Orange Green.
Image on the right is entitled Green Monster.
And this is a two layered image.
The background image is a straight photo.
And the foreground image are appropriated images of tear gas
that I found online.
Today, tear gas is the most commonly used form
of what's known in law enforcement
jargon as less lethal force.
Journalists file news stories of tear gas deployment
so regularly that pictures of smoke
filled streets have come to feel like stock photography.
A theatrical backdrop of protests.
Banyan Blue.
Palm Orange.
Image on the left, Purple Haze.
Image on the right, White.
So this body of work was actually a response to a video
that I saw during the BLM uprisings in LA.
And it was this video from downtown LA
where there were protesters.
And they were kind of trapped against a fence.
They had nowhere to go.
But they were being horribly tear gassed.
There was just like so much smoke everywhere.
They were being tear gassed by the police.
And I wanted to--
I didn't want to envision that in a landscape.
But thinking about my practice where I do
talk a lot about my Vietnamese-Americaness,
what would that look like in a landscape?
So thinking about those folks in downtown la
being gassed in the city, and then thinking
about the families that were gassed in their home provinces
and small towns in Vietnam, and this body of work
emerged from those concepts.
Pho x Scape, 2020.
Ongoing.
All of my works are ongoing until I stop working on them.
So this is a statement for Pho x Scape.
"San Diego, Boston, Berlin, Sydney, Hawaii, Paris, Ottawa.
The Vietnamese diaspora has established communities
in every corner of the world.
Some live their new lives as though they were still there.
Others preserve more of a distance to their lives
before exile.
The reopening of the country, Vietnam,
at the beginning of the '90s many of the Viet Kieu,
as the people who left are called in their home country,
have made the return journey.
However, many still shrink back from returning.
From the confrontation between their memories
and the reality of the country.
From the return of seeing their memories
contradicted at every street corner.
Or of reawakening other memories carefully buried."
So this body of work was actually sponsored by Nikon.
Like I don't get sponsored ever.
But there is a branding company in LA, they saw me work,
they reached out.
And they wanted to like--
Nikon had this Z Creators.
And they wanted to rebrand Nikon.
I made sure.
I sent an email back, are you sure this is the type of work
that Nikon is looking for?
Because I don't only shoot straight photos.
I make collages.
So yeah, they are like, yes.
We are looking for new voices.
We are looking for new folks.
Let's collaborate.
So I got a stipend.
They sent me a camera.
And I made this body of work, which is still
in the realm of my voice.
But these images are non-appropriated.
They are all shot through a Nikon Z. So imagery
on the left, PHOXSCAPE Saigon Blue.
Image on the right, PHOXSCAPE Cafe Plus Purple.
So this is a two layered collage.
And these images of the Pho storefronts
were all photographed here in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
And also Westminster, which has a huge Vietnamese population.
But this body of work is ongoing because I feel like once--
excuse me.
Once the world opens back up, I plan
to travel to like Little Saigons or Little
Hanois throughout the world.
I did a Google image map search in the Czech Republic.
And there is a Little Hanoi Plaza
in a small city within the Czech Republic.
So I feel like, again, this body of work
is ongoing because we are everywhere.
So as a child of refugee immigrants,
our livelihood was built upon Pho shops and restaurants.
A meld of my upbringing.
Food, culture, land, and environment.
I have fond memories of many birthday parties
at my parent's pho restaurant as a kid in San Diego.
This stacked scape flattens moments and environments
into a reimagined landscape.
And this body of where it came from--
I think it was a late night thought of how did pho happen?
Who was the originator of this broth?
And then I visioned this person in a hut in the jungle
just kind of like throwing together these ingredients
and boiling water.
And pho magically became a thing.
So again, this is me envisioning those moments.
Building that bridge between the past and the present.
OK.
We're going to move on.
Move on to a lot of candid family images.
So this is going to be cute.
OK.
Influence.
I always get this question of, how do you make the work?
I don't know.
It just comes.
And I just run with it.
So Influence: My Family Archives from San Diego to Vietnam.
And I have this image on my fridge now.
And I always think that it's such a funny image.
And to me, it was funny then eating these banh mi's,
which is a Vietnamese sandwich, on the beach in San Diego is
because I always felt like I wanted more
Americanized things like nachos, or hot dogs, or things
like that.
But I didn't realize what I was missing until I went back
into the archive to take a look at my childhood
where my parents were doing their best,
and trying to figure out how to raise Vietnamese American kids
in America.
So this image here is--
this is my younger brother.
This is myself here with the red barrettes.
My older sister.
And this is our family friend.
Mission Beach, San Diego, 1987.
My parents also owned a pho restaurant
in the mid '80s early '90s in San Diego
where there was a large Vietnamese community.
A lot of partying, drinking, laughing just
like coming together.
A lot of beer.
A lot of Budweiser, Sunkist, roasted pig.
This is myself here in the foreground circa 1984.
This person here with this striped top is my mom.
I grew up in a city called City Heights, also known
as East San Diego.
And I didn't realize, again, that it
was ranked number four in the nation of having
the most Vietnamese Americans in the United States.
So this image on the left is an image of my dad.
And this is in front of an Asian cinema in City Heights.
And this was an image of my dad's pho restaurant
grand opening March 4, 1988.
Family Portrait San Diego to Vietnam.
Just making note on the similarities and differences
within environments, and questioning
everything as an adult now.
Trying to figure out how we landed in the states,
and why I am here now making this work.
So this is a portrait of my family here on the left.
San Diego State, 1982.
This is an image of my uncle, my mom's younger brother,
and his family same time frame.
OK.
So this is myself here being held as a baby.
And this is my cousin, and we're the same age,
but the image is completely--
to me, it just feels so detached.
I didn't understand all of this foliage.
It didn't make sense to me.
The clothes didn't make sense to me.
There was like a lot of photos of my extended family Vietnam
barefoot.
And I just thought that it was such a vintage old image.
But it was around the same time period.
So far for this lecture, I never knew
how to describe this word which is nhau, nhau.
What is Vietnamese drinking and eating with friends and family
called?
And I just always remember this word because as a kid,
my dad would say, oh, our friends are
going to come over to nhau.
And I had no idea what that meant.
Even when I would visit Vietnam, my family members we like
gather.
It's a huge family.
Everyone cooks.
There's a lot of beer drinking.
So now I can kind of share this information with you all.
Again, image on the left, San Diego.
Image on the right, my uncles in Vietnam.
So my mom was a seamstress most of my life.
And a lot of our clothes were sewn.
Like hand sewn by my mom.
Bottom left image is a candid of my sister and myself.
And we had a lot of matching outfits.
And I used to be so embarrassed.
But it made sense.
It was cheap.
We needed to save money.
And now like looking back on it, I would wear that.
That looks like great lounge wear.
I would wear that at home.
It looks cozy.
It's probably cotton.
It's good for your skin.
But I think as a kid, you just like so embarrassed.
I wasn't embarrassed of my culture.
It wasn't that.
It's just I didn't know what my culture was.
Image on the right, in every home we lived in San Diego
my dad would hang this flag, which
is a South Vietnamese flag.
South Vietnamese freedom flag for all
of the South Vietnamese people.
And I didn't realize what that was
until I went back into the archives to do that research,
and kind of like teach myself that information.
So this is how the work happens.
I sit, I look through images, I ask a lot of questions.
I talk to my parents.
I ask them about their journey.
What it was like back home.
Portrait of my dad.
Portrait of my grandfathers.
Image on the left, mom posing in front yard in front
of structures.
This is my mom's mom here on the right.
Image of my mom on the left in San Diego.
Also living in a lot of apartments in San Diego,
my dad would build all of these like structures
to grow vegetables.
And it would just grow.
So I feel like a lot of Vietnamese people
have that like green thumb to just grow anything anywhere.
Again, a lot of just researching,
and a lot of looking.
A lot of looking at portraits, candids, foliage.
So my dad was a portrait photographer in Saigon
before the fall.
And when the fall happened, the Viet Cong
took over his portrait studio.
And then naturally my parents fled on boat.
I think they fled to Malaysia, to Canada, to California.
So when we settled in San Diego, my dad
still picked up a camera.
That's why we have so many candids of my childhood, which
is really fortunate because there
are a lot of other Vietnamese American people my age
that don't have the luxuries of looking back
into their archives.
So in terms of also influence, yes, the candid images
really influence and like sparked curiosity.
But I think this is like the number one
image that sparked curiosity for me was this single image here.
Actually, I have this framed in my home.
And this image is of my mom and my older sister.
And this is an image of them at a refugee
camp in Malaysia in 1978.
And on the back of this image it reads, "In Malaysia."
So from there, I assume that this was a portrait of, again,
my sister, my mom in Malaysia.
And I would go back and ask my parents about their journey.
And then from there, I would reconstruct a visual narrative
on how to tell this oral story that my parents have given me.
Yeah it's a lot.
I do have a lot of research.
You just learned so much about yourself.
So here is a postcard that is addressed to my dad.
And this was when they were sponsored
by a church in White Rock, Canada.
And this is dated February 26, 1980.
It reads, "Dear, everyone.
Greetings from Barbados where it's warm and sunny 85 degrees.
I swim in the sea every day, and really enjoying.
Will be back in White Rock around 8th of March.
Hope all is well with you, and that you are keeping
well and learning English fast.
Susie.
So Susie was my parent's host person.
Before the pandemic, I went to Vancouver for the first time.
And Vancouver is about an hour from White Rock.
And I Googled the image.
I went to go look at the house.
I drove in front of the house.
And I just sat there for a second.
But it was just way too dark.
Way too late for a stranger to knock on a stranger's door.
So I'll leave that to another time.
It would just be another body of work.
But again, I think this is just so
important in terms of research.
We would get a lot of mail with this like specific envelopes.
And I thought every person in America had these envelopes.
But it was just really specific to families
that had families overseas.
I didn't realize that as a kid.
OK.
How many slides do I have left?
55 slides.
15 more slides.
A portrait of my father.
A portrait of my mom.
This is a body of work inside of Portrait Bomb.
Image on the left Mother Lotus.
Image on the right, Father Chrysanthemum.
So there's a huge collaboration with the archive, my dad's
archive.
And kind of like repurposing those images.
This one's entitled Agent Bomb on the left.
Image on the right is the original portrait of my mom.
So the image that was appropriated
is Four Ranch Hand C-123 Aircraft Spraying Liquid Agent
Orange Defoliant in South Vietnam.
Portrait Bomb.
Field Bomb.
There's this body of work entitled, World Wars, which
I created in 2019-20.
And it is documentations of families, soldiers,
and individuals in Vietnam during the War
with family photographs of my own mother and siblings.
The cumulative effect of this imagery
evokes the importance of personal and collective
remembrance.
By digitally rebuilding temporal and historical disruptions,
I comment on the idea of home displacement separation
and how we embrace and conquer loss.
Tragic and poetic composites unravel narratives,
and place my Vietnamese American perspective
into a contemporary landscape.
This image here is personally entitled, World War Mothers.
Background image, a single mother
with her three children in between boat rescue.
This one is entitled, World War Apartment.
Mom and daughters after being rescued from a Naval ship.
World War Backyard.
US military and fields of color coded pink smoke.
World War Beach.
Top image, Vietnamese family hiding from gunfire.
Bottom image, military coming upon shore with weapons.
I think this is going to be the last body of work
that I'm going to show or talk about.
So this body of work is entitled,
Home: Faux Family Album.
And I started this in 2011 while in grad school.
But it did my advisors were not into this I was working
on another body of work.
I hit a wall with the other body of work.
So I needed to take a break.
I started on this new body of work
just to dump some, process some of information.
Yeah, it didn't sit well with them.
I stopped working on the work.
Then I picked up the work back in 2019.
And this body of work [INAUDIBLE],,
I created a series of faux family portraits.
I scanned in old family photographs of my relatives
in Vietnam, and paired them with images of family homes
I photographed throughout Los Angeles.
By doing this, I'm fabricating a substitute family photo album
thinking of the many displaced families
and individuals that have escaped in search of asylum.
The language in my work touches on separation and bridges
the question of what came before and what's to follow.
So I don't share the original candids often.
So image on the right is the original candid.
And I love that like in every culture
we have our family photos in front of the home, in the yard,
in front of a structure.
This is my grandmother in the center with her sisters.
These are my maternal grandparents.
OK.
So influence.
Influence.
I just wanted to share this stack of books
as like my current influences.
And I feel as an artist--
when I was a new artist just like making work,
I didn't realize that there--
it didn't feel like there were a lot
of Vietnamese American artists making work.
But now I see that there are more emerging.
So here are a few artists, creatives,
that influence my work.
Thui Bui, graphic novelist.
Ocean Vuong, writer.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, writer.
Quyen Nguyen-Le, young Vietnamese filmmaker.
And I came across this young Vietnamese French collage
artist Prune Phi in social media.
The current films that I think about often
are In the Mood For Love.
I think the cinematography is just so beautiful.
Current, current , current film, Minari.
I love a good coming of age drama.
This is my last slide.
This is an image of myself and my mom last year in La Jolla.
And this is an image of myself and my mom from 1982
at San Diego State.
So I'm going to end my share.
Ann, I'm curious to know is your family comfortable--
I assume they are.
But are they comfortable with the fact
that you use their archives, and use their likeness,
and their images in your work?
Or have you ever bumped up against any sort
of tension over that issue?
I feel like when my mom and my dad
first saw my work in a postcard, it was for a show.
And they did it data understand what was happening because it's
not like a traditional image.
It's like an image that has been manipulated.
So at first, they're questioning why is this mass produced?
Why is this mass produced?
They questioned why is it important.
I think the huge part of it was just confusion.
Right.
And I think my parents' generation
where they came to America to survive,
and the next generation, which is my generation,
we do have that luxury to research and make the work.
So I don't think they were like any heads that were bumped.
It's more so I need to--
I've sat down with them.
I had to slowly tell them what I do.
And there's also a language barrier.
My Vietnamese is not all that great.
And they're English is not all that great.
So I had to slowly tell them, hey, this is my practice.
This is what I teach.
This is what I talk about.
It's important because there's not
a lot of people who are talking about this now.
And if I don't talk about it, then it
might be like lost in the next generations.
So I think right now in terms of are
they OK with seeing their likeness out in the world?
I think right now it's neutral.
I think I will always have that conversation with them
on why I'm using the archives.
Here's something in the chat from Cindy.
Can read that.
The World War images remind me of Martha--
I'm going to say this wrong.
Oh, Martha Rosler.
With the mixing of war and domestic imagery,
do you consider your work in conversation
with the history of feminist art?
Yes, indeed.
I think so.
I think there are a few works that do touch
on the history of feminism.
And also like the political nature of work.
But also, again, I'm thinking about my mom a lot
when I make the work.
So it's going to always have that sentiment.
So yes.
You mentioned that you have visited Vietnam at least once.
Probably more.
I think it's interesting how you talked about the fact
that for a lot of your family the idea of returning
is such a mixed bag.
It's so full of fear, and trauma,
and the sort of sadness about the way things have changed.
So you are obviously the family historian
in addition to being an artist.
You're obviously very connected to the family archives.
So I'm curious to know if you had
any of that same kind of reaction when you went back?
I know you didn't have those memories necessarily.
But you're still carrying that imagery with you.
So I'm curious to know what that experience was like.
My first trip back to Vietnam was I think in 2004, 2005.
And I definitely did want to go back.
But there were other chances to go back as a teenager.
But I don't know why I was fighting the 15 hour
flight as a teenager.
So I didn't go the first time around.
But my first trip in the early 2000s I
didn't have any expectations.
Right.
And I wanted to understand more of the culture, and my family,
and how they couldn't flee or they couldn't leave.
And now they're just--
they're not stuck.
I don't want to call it stuck because they
love their lives here.
But I think as the next generation,
we are so curious on what it's like.
What is our homeland like?
What is the motherland like?
What does it smell like?
How will people perceive you?
So as a curious person, I was kind of
open to all of that information with open arms.
I'm going to embrace everything and take a lot of notes.
But I think that first time back,
I wasn't really making collages.
I took a lot of portraits of my family,
and a lot of images of landscape.
But I've been back a total of three times.
And I feel like every time I'm like learning
more and more about the space.
But I think for my parents, it was just hard for them
because they lived through it all that.
And also like talking to my peers that
are the same age that are talking
about this type of information and their artworks,
their parents feel the same way.
They never want to go back because they have this idea
of what it was when they left.
So the change was really hard for them.
The change was hard for my dad.
He was very like mad.
They're like certain words that you can't say.
You can't say-- you shouldn't say Viet Cong in Vietnam
because it's supposed to be negative.
So you're supposed to call them the police.
My dad was like, they're not the police.
They harmed us.
They are the Viet Cong.
So it's hard to go back with my dad
because he will cause ruckus.
And we have to be there to like, OK, dad.
We don't want you to get stuck here.
You need to come back to the States
after our holiday is over.
So there are a lot of things that are happening,
I have a question for you.
Yeah, so like you, many of our students
are first generation college students.
Is there any advice that you could
share with our students who might be interested in pursuing
a career in the arts?
Yeah.
I'm kind of like torn here.
I think if you want to pursue a career in the arts, yes, do it.
I can't say like form a voice sooner than later
because like it would be great if I formed my voice sooner
than later because then I'd be like projected by now.
But I feel like this projection is on time for me now.
But I feel like as a first gen, do it.
Do a lot of writing.
Do some research.
Talk to your elders.
Make fun work.
I feel like this work doesn't--
from an outsider's point of view,
it might not look fun because it's a lot of like sadness.
But it's really fun for me to deconstruct
all of this history.
And reconstruct it to my visual liking.
So I'm remaking history right now that
can be in art history books.
So I think, yes.
Those first gen students, what do you want to talk about?
Let's talk about it, and let's make it great.
Also don't stress yourselves out about money.
Look for that financial aid.
This is real.
Look for financial aid.
There are grants out there and scholarships.
But I think like the number one thing is
do what you want respectfully.
So you talked about how the work is fun.
But earlier, you also talked about how
it's like heavy, heavy stuff.
It's like your heavy lifting in the work.
So I don't know if I'm going to articulate this well.
But I'm curious, how do you take care of yourself
in creating this work that is so powerful and heavy?
That's a really good question.
So the fun part of this is I'm learning a lot about myself.
I am naturally a crier.
I cry a lot in critiques.
I cried a lot in undergraduate and graduate studies.
And I've grown comfortable with that.
I'm just going to cry.
It's happening.
Right?
It's going to happen.
I'm just going to let it go, and then it'll pass.
So as I'm making the work, that will initially happen.
And I think it's strange where I go through these moments
where it's like I'm really sad, I'm really mad,
I'm really angry.
And then that makes the work really great.
So I like channel that energy.
But that is exhausting.
You're dehydrated.
You don't want to turn on the computer to make the work.
So for me, there's a lot of downtime
where I'm just sitting.
I text this a lot to a lot of my friends.
They're like, hey, what are you doing?
And it's like night.
8:00 PM to sunset.
Well, I'm just sitting on the couch
in the dark with a candle lit.
And they're like, are you OK.
And I'm like, yeah.
I'm great.
So I think it's like my form of meditation
where I'm just like in complete silence,
or I go to a lot of bars.
I drink a lot of cocktails.
When the world opens again, or prior to the pandemic,
I would go see a lot of art.
I think that really helps flesh out a lot of my information
that I'm going through.
I go on like a lot of holidays.
So there is a huge aspect of me like dumping that energy
that I'm putting into the work.
I'm going to talk about this a bit more where
I was on the phone with someone, and they
asked the same question.
They're like how do you--
do you seek therapy or counseling?
And my response was like, no, because I put it into the work.
And then he brought up David Lynch.
And he says David Lynch doesn't seek therapy or counseling
because he feels like that's going to kill the work.
And then I'm just sitting there on the phone
like, yeah, that's how I feel.
That's how I feel.
But I could be wrong.
I can seek therapy and counseling,
and my work can segue to it's higher platform.
But yeah.
There's this other side where I zen out.
When I'm out in the world, I zen out my brain.
I think about nothing.
I'm in the present moment.
But when I'm doing the work, it's like 100% in the work.
Speaking of your work and things being heavy,
this past year's been kind of challenging.
I mean, with the pandemic obviously, racial upheaval,
unrest, the emerging public health crisis
that will definitely outlast where we're at now with COVID.
How has the past year changed your studio practice?
I wonder if you're willing to dive into that.
I also teach college.
So what are we 2021?
I think that my Zoom--
being on a computer with students and Zooming,
is a lot of work.
It's way more work than a lot of people think it is.
And then getting on the same computer
to try to make the work is hard because I
don't want to turn on the computer
most days because I'm on it all day.
So I think it's definitely changed my rigor.
I don't get on the computer much as of late.
Like this year, I feel like I'll get on
if I'm like really upset about something,
and I need to flesh out that energy.
But yeah.
I think this year, the pandemic has made
me work less on my practice.
I'm in the same space all day long.
So I don't know.
I need to figure that out for myself
for later this year, and next year, and the following years.
But it's difficult to live in your studio,
and work in your studio, and teach in your studio.
So once it's safe to go back to teaching,
I think that dynamic is going to shift for me.
So when thinking about the future,
I know are you talking about how you're not
creating at the same level that you once were.
But is there anything sort of on the horizon
that you could share with us that you have coming up?
Yeah.
OK.
So I should be working on this.
I'm not working on this.
But I feel like as artists we're natural procrastinators.
And I'll just knock it out.
So fall 2021, I'm going to be in a two person group show
at Texas Christian University-- they have a contemporary museum
on campus--
with another Vietnamese American artist
that's based in California.
So yeah.
We are in the works of the logistics of accommodations
if I go for artist lectures or studio visits.
Yeah.
But right now, I am thinking about the work.
But I'm not physically making any of the work.
But I think yeah.
I have like a year and a half.
I think by fall this year, I'll start
like drafting out the work.
But that's my one big thing.
I think for now, it's just a lot of Zooms that have happened.
And I'm teaching many courses this fall.
So right now is like downtime to just--
I'm just relaxing right now.
I need to not do anything for maybe two weeks.
Good for you.
And thinking is a big part of that practice.
Right?
Yeah.
Not given enough credit.
Yeah.
It's hard.
It's hard to think about things.
Making them is cool because I think
like the more you think about them you're like, OK,
I know how to process this.
OK, this is going to look great.
OK, this makes sense.
So I'm not the type of person to jump into the making.
I need to do all of the brain work first.
Absolutely.
Well, I have many more questions.
But I think you and I will have to chat at another time.
We'll have to have you back.
But I want to thank you so much for your time, and creativity,
and energy today.
And thank everyone who attended today and spent a little bit
of their afternoon with us.
We appreciate you.
So reminder to all of you who are here today.
Roman's putting some links in the chat.
We'd really appreciate if you take two minutes
to do the survey.
Thanks, everybody.
And please take good care.
Thank you.
Have a great day.
Stay healthy, please.
Stay hydrated.